Cabinet Appointment

See? It's funny because I made a joke about a political cabinet but the blog is actually about the wooden kind. Okay, it isn't that funny. Fine. Well, we finally got our act together and put up the cabinets in the kitchen. Before we go much farther, let me say this: I once was blind and now I can see. The cabinets are perfect. That blank wall was useless and off-putting and it looks perfect now. It's not so much like we added something that wasn't there as it is like we put something back that should've been there the whole time. Hopefully the pictures will get the feeling across and you'll see what I mean. They have so much more of an effect on the look of the kitchen than they really should.

Okay, this is a very old picture. Like before we moved in. So, lest you think we're savages, we aren't actually living and eating in a kitchen that looks like this.

We used the stud-finder to locate the nominal center of the piece (my dad has a really great stud-finder but it's still rarely dead-on) and then use the tiny nails on either side to find where the middle actually is.

A laser, you say? Yeah, it's awesome. My dad also got a self-leveling laser level that came in very handy for this project. We threw a beam up on the wall to mark the middles of the studs and also the edges of the cabinets. That piece saved us so much time and energy.

Here it is. So cool. It's actually a plum bob with a laser in it, so it's just hanging free in a chamber inside. It doesn't matter if your surface is level or not, the line always will be. You can also mount it on a tripod and stuff, so that's cool. It even has an electric motor attached to a suction cup on the back so you can stick it to a wall or whatever.

We drilled through the back and got some damage inside even with a small drill bit. Probably should've used some masking tape or something.

Got the screws started in here so it'll be easier to drive them into the wall.

This is the jack from my dad's truck. We used that, a piece of particle board to protect the tile, and a piece of scrap wood from the garage to keep from damaging the cabinet. It worked perfectly. We got a nice snug fit up against the ceiling and could raise or lower it if we needed to adjust anything.

Hooray! One cabinet on the wall under its own power. This one was placed such that it got two screws into studs on the bottom, and one on top. Apparently you only need two to hold these up (or so the mounting instructions say) but I'm glad we got an extra. The top right one was hitting a nail or something in the stud so we couldn't get it to sink. Lame. I may put a shorter one in there just to make it symmetrical.

Time for cabinet number two! Same setup. We're attaching this one to the existing cabinet first, then attaching to the wall. This is important so you make sure your face frames line up evenly.

We drilled through with a thin bit, and the re-drilled with this larger bit up to the tape. The idea was to keep the screw threads from driving the two pieces apart too much and it worked pretty well.

There we are. First connection between them. The face frames aren't perfectly flat and square so it took a little wiggling to get them to line up. Even then, they're not perfect. They're as good as we could get them though, and the difference is almost invisible to anyone but us, I'm sure.

Two cabinets up on the wall!

Here we go. Once we prime and paint the walls in the kitchen, it's going to look so much nicer. Everything's coming together!

Look at all that storage! We basically added another 50% in upper cabinet space compared to what we had before. It's a huge addition in organization and room to expand. I'm thinking we'll be able to move quite a few things out of the pantry and into the cabinets so we'll free up more room to be able to put things in some sort of order.

I'm so pleased with this change! The kitchen is slowly coming together now.We have quite a bit left to do, but big projects are getting checked off the list. Thanks for reading!